CDSE Days spotlight big data and supercomputing

Thom Dunning, center, talks with UB’s Michel Dupuis (left) and Abani Patra (right) during CDSE Days. Dunning was one of three keynote speakers at the six-day event, which brought some of the nation’s most prominent scholars in the field of data-enabled science to UB.

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Interested in personalized medicine?

Want to know how IBM’s Watson outsmarted “Jeopardy!” champ Ken Jennings? Curious about big data and the world’s most powerful supercomputers?

These topics—and much more—were discussed at this year’s CDSE Days, a six-day program at the University at Buffalo that explored how big data and high-performance computing have become essential to scientific progress, economic competitiveness, national security, medicine and other issues.

The program brought some of the nation’s most preeminent scholars of data-enabled science to Buffalo. Highlights included:

  • A keynote lecture by David Higdon, professor in the Social Decision Analytics Laboratory at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, entitled “Connecting model-based predictions to reality.”
  • A workshop by Gandolfo “Randy” Messina, worldwide public sector manager, IBM Watson Analytics, entitled “An introduction to Watson analytics.”
  • A keynote lecture by Thom H. Dunning Jr., director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, entitled “Leading-edge computers and the extraordinary research they enable.”
  • A keynote lecture by Mark Ainsworth, professor of applied mathematics at Brown University, entitled “Multigrid at scale?”

CDSE stands for Computational and Data-enabled Science and Engineering, a new doctoral program at UB.